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Article #5379

Re: SCIENCE WITHOUT NEWTON EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT

#5379
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:43
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For the moment John Stachel and Jean Eisenstaedt are the only
Einsteinians who want to reintroduce Newton's emission theory of
light, without abandoning (at least not explicitly) Einstein's
idiocies:

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm
John Stachel: "The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of
particles had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity
into the middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission
theory" of light, a phrase I shall use. The need to explain the
phenomena of interference, diffraction and polarization of light
gradually led physicists to abandon the emission theory in favor of
the competing wave theory, previously its less-favored rival.
Maxwell's explanation of light as a type of electromagnetic wave
seemed to end the controversy with a definitive victory of the wave
theory. However, if Einstein was right (as events slowly proved he
was) the story must be much more complicated. Einstein was aware of
the difficulties with Maxwell's theory-and of the need for what we now
call a quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation-well before
publishing his SRT paper. He regarded Maxwell's equations as some sort
of statistical average-of what he did not know, of course-which worked
very well to explain many optical phenomena, but could not be used to
explain all the interactions of light and matter. A notable feature of
his first light quantum paper is that it almost completely avoids
mention of the ether, even in discussing Maxwell's theory. Giving up
the ether concept allowed Einstein to envisage the possibility that a
beam of light was "an independent structure," as he put it a few years
later, "which is radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's
emission theory of light."......If we model a beam of light as a
stream of particles, the two principles can still be obeyed. A few
years later (1909), Einstein first publicly expressed the view that an
adequate future theory of light would have to be some sort of fusion
of the wave and emission theories. This is an example of how the
special theory of relativity functioned as a theory of principle,
limiting but not fixing the choice of a constructive theory of light."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com
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From: Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.maths,fr.sci.philo
Subject: Re: SCIENCE WITHOUT NEWTON EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2008 08:43:29 -0700 (PDT)
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